Bacon eBook

Bacon was one of those men to whom posterity forgives
a great deal for the greatness of what he has done
and attempted for posterity. It is idle, unless
all honest judgment is foregone, to disguise the many
deplorable shortcomings of his life; it is unjust to
have one measure for him, and another for those about
him and opposed to him. But it is not too much
to say that in temper, in honesty, in labour, in humility,
in reverence, he was the most perfect example that
the world had yet seen of the student of nature, the
enthusiast for knowledge. That such a man was
tempted and fell, and suffered the Nemesis of his fall,
is an instance of the awful truth embodied in the
tragedy of Faust. But his genuine devotion,
so unwearied and so paramount, to a great idea and
a great purpose for the good of all generations to
come, must shield him from the insult of Pope’s
famous and shallow epigram. Whatever may have
been his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been
the “meanest of mankind,” who lived and
died, holding unaltered, amid temptations and falls,
so noble a conception of the use and calling of his
life: the duty and service of helping his brethren
to know as they had never yet learned to know.
That thought never left him; the obligations it imposed
were never forgotten in the crush and heat of business;
the toils, thankless at the time, which it heaped
upon him in addition to the burdens of public life
were never refused. Nothing diverted him, nothing
made him despair. He was not discouraged because
he was not understood. There never was any one
in whose life the “Souverainete du but”
was more certain and more apparent; and that object
was the second greatest that man can have. To
teach men to know is only next to making them good.

The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the Novum
Organum, the method of experiment and induction,
are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to a misconception
of what Bacon did. Bacon is, and is not, the founder
of modern science. What Bacon believed could
be done, what he hoped and divined, for the correction
and development of human knowledge, was one thing;
what his methods were, and how far they were successful,
is another. It would hardly be untrue to say
that though Bacon is the parent of modern science,
his methods contributed nothing to its actual discoveries;
neither by possibility could they have done so.
The great and wonderful work which the world owes
to him was in the idea, and not in the execution.
The idea was that the systematic and wide examination
of facts was the first thing to be done in science,
and that till this had been done faithfully and impartially,
with all the appliances and all the safeguards that
experience and forethought could suggest, all generalisations,
all anticipations from mere reasoning, must be adjourned
and postponed; and further, that sought on these conditions,
knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men